


Momentum

by rolameny



Series: Destiny fics [2]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2018-12-21 06:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11938347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rolameny/pseuds/rolameny
Summary: The story of a Warlock who kept going.





	1. Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Fills for [Destiny Week](https://destinyweek.tumblr.com/)! Each day's prompt is a chapter.

Step 1: Complete Vanguard Missions

> “Trust your gun as an extension of your arm; trust your Ghost as an extension of your Light. May your aim be true.” –Saint-14

 

The doors slide open ahead of her, one by one. Her Ghost is a light above, pulsing with the effort to hack locks so quickly on the run. The Cabal don't bother plugging up every small hole in their defences, which is great right up till they find you in the core of one of their ten-deck command ships. The Light flows strange in this corner of space, sticky against Rust's skin, and Ghost doesn't want to have to chance a resurrection here. Instead of fighting, they run.

A rocket slams against her heels – she tumbles, tucks into a forward roll, jumps out of it, keeps running. She's leaving bloody footprints behind her now, stamping her boot treads onto the metal flooring.

The lighting flickers wildly, Rust's shadow running ahead of her and splashing up on the walls as the Cabal's shots light up the hallway.

“Want to try the vents?” Ghost asks her. They trade a look.

“Not really,” Rust says, strained, but they slam around a corner and there's another squad of Cabal coming towards them, shields up and guns out. “But it's not like we've a choice, so let's go–”

She sends a blast of energy at the Cabal in front of her. Rust doesn't have the fine control of older Guardians yet, only three months into this new life of hers, and it rips out of her palms twice as big as she intended, stinging her skin under her heavy gauntlets. It rattles her teeth, but it bowls all the Cabal in front of her completely over – she'll take it.

“Marked position,” says Ghost – and there it is in her HUD, a weak point in the heavy ceiling, twenty feet up. Rust eyes it. But there's that clanking of big turtle boots behind her – she takes two running steps forward, jumps onto the shield of the phalanx soldier lying down in front of his squad, and springboards up. She hits the vent grate knuckle-first, punches a hole right through it, and drags herself in. It hurts, but it means she's not there when the first Cabal squad skids around the corner to see the bloody footprint on that phalanx shield.

Their jumpship's waiting, parked around back of an asteroid dense enough to fool the Cabal's sensors, dull enough they haven't mined it. They just have to get high enough they can transmat back to it safely.

Rust scrambles through the vents on hands and knees, twitching her coat out of the way again and again. Her Ghost lights the way ahead in shimming wireframes, shows her where to go – this bend of a Y-junction, back around here, quick and silent as they can. This would never work on a Fallen ship, where the soldiers sneak professionally, and build on a reasonable scale. On a Cabal ship, only the psions can follow her through the vents, and she hopes they shook them about four turns ago.

The next vent she's got to get through cuts through bulkheads going up, nearly perfectly vertical. There aren't any decent handholds, of course. Rust pulls void to her aching fingertips and stabs them through the metal, making grips one by one. It's as clear a trail as anything, if the psions are still following, but then again, so's all the blood.

There's stomping and shouting, muffled by metal walls, a klaxon grating against her eardrums. Rust hauls herself out of the vertical pipe into a short dead-end, flops down to rest a moment. She can feel that climb all through her shoulders.

“Almost there,” her Ghost says, covering up worry in his voice. “But you'll have to leave the vents to get up to the last deck. And there's trouble ahead. Can you handle it?”

Rust takes a long breath, loud in her helmet, and shakes out her shoulders as much as the cramped vent will allow. “Got my gun, got my Ghost. Don't need more than that. Let's go.”

She takes the grate out under her with an elbow, this time. She slides out and lands on her toes – winces when her heels hit the ground – winces again when she looks up and sees the Centurion in the opening doorway, flanked by a pair of psions angled forward like bloodhounds.

It's a fast, desperate fight. Rust goes for the psions first, gets one with a bullet to the eye and a fistful of void flung out in front of her, but just manages to wing the other one before it skitters away behind her. By then the Centurion's charging, so she jumps straight up and grabs at strings of Light to keep her hovering there above him long enough to unload a clip into his helmet. He staggers, and that's enough time for her to land and the psion to try a swipe at her. Rust kicks it away from her, leaps again forward over it and slams another clip home. She spins to put a bullet in the psion's gut and watch it go down, and the Centurion barrels straight into her with his shield, jets flaming.

On the ground, Rust twists out of the way of a reinforced Cabal boot to the neck. It gets her in the shoulder instead, and her right arm goes weak. The noise she makes then is one she will never, ever cop to.

Her Ghost's a presence in her mind, but he doesn't distract her. She rolls up onto her knees, drags together a handful of void, slams it to the Centurion's belly plate, and wills it: explode.

All the power of a void grenade, confined: she takes out a chunk from the Centurion and flies backwards. She hits the body of the first psion and its Light-forsaken helmet gets her right in the kidney. She heaves herself up just enough to put enough bullets into the Centurion to make sure it won't get up again.

When she passes it, she stoops to pick up its cannon, and its leg spasms in death.

“Me too, big guy,” she tells it, and gives the kind of laugh that has her Ghost spinning himself back into physical being at her shoulder to give her that look, the one with all his corners held tense.

Then it's up two steep ramps – the Cabal don't seem to go in much for stairs – and then out a window, onto the domed hull. She eyes the window.

“You've seen my shoulder, right?” she says, and her Ghost just nudges her in response. His casing chimes against the metal of her gorget.

“Well, alright,” she says, and puts five heavy-duty Cabal slugs into the glass where her Ghost marks it for her. She heaves the cannon itself at the window after, tagging it with the infinitely heavy void of a black hole.

A few things happen in quick sequence after that: the window shatters; the doors all slam shut in automatic defence; another klaxon goes off; Rust is blown out of the base by the vacuum coming in to meet her.

She grabs onto the edge of the windowframe as she goes, and swings herself around with a twist onto the hull. She thumps down onto it, energy spent, and feels her shoulder. Feels something wrenched inside it, a sharp pain. Fracture, maybe a break. There's bits of reinforced glass stuck in the palms of her gauntlets, and under them her hands are void-burnt.

Rust looks up. Her Ghost, blown a hundred yards out into open space, flickers once and reappears in front of her. She looks at him.

“We out of the zone?” she asks.

“We sure are! Let's get out of here, Guardian,” her Ghost says. She starts her cheer on the hull of a Cabal base ship and ends it wreathed in the light of transmat in the cockpit of her little ship.

The lights blink on one by one in sequence and the engine kicks up with a rumble. Rust reaches up to get her helmet off and hisses: her shoulders have given up on her, now they're out of immediate danger.

“Oh, don't – I've got you,” says her Ghost, and transmats the helmet right off her head and onto the floor of the ship. “Now sit still. I'm driving.”

A blue light sinks into her shoulder, her Ghost starting the slow work of knitting tissue and bone back together. It's a good feeling – cleansing, after the odd denseness of the Light back in the Cabal engine room. That's worrying. That's something that's going to go on the Weird Shit section of her official report. (It's officially the Unexplained Phenomena section, but this is one instance where Rust actually agrees with Cayde-6.)

“Don't worry,” she says. “Ow. Okay, maybe worry a little. But we'll be fine. Cabal can't match us for speed or track us. We got the intel, we got out. I'll be fine. Like I said back there, got my gun, got my Ghost. The essentials.”

Her Ghost spins his front segments clockwise and his back segments anticlockwise: a tired, relieved laugh. “And I guess I've got my Guardian, so what'm I fussing for? Let's go home, Rust.”


	2. Classes

Step 2: Find Your Place

> “The Tower is old, and it takes time to learn its ways. Here's a start: dance party in the hangar basement twice a week. Bring snacks and your best moves.” –note stapled to the front of a guide to the Tower handed around to new Guardians

There's a Hunter perched on top of a flagpole, in one of the Tower's smaller courtyards. Rust squints up at him.

He waves.

Rust stares.

He does a careful two-step, and waves again.

Rust hops onto the back of a bench, scrambles up a tree, edges along to the end of a branch, and leaps.

She gets a single handful of banner. The Hunter, six feet up, looks down at her.

“Sup,” he says.

Rust heaves on the fabric, and at the same time pushes _up_ with the Light. She floats up on that puff of energy to settle down on the pole's crossbar.

“Looks like a nice place to hang out,” she says. The Traveler is easy to see from here, low sun behind it painting its belly orange. The city sprawls out, lights already winking on in the Traveler's shade, and the wall winds high on the horizon.

“Sure is!” says the Hunter. “I'm Asaamu.”

“Rust.”

“Well, hey, Rust. You new here?”

“I've been alive for something like four months,” Rust says. “I think that still counts as new.”

“A real baby Guardian! Wow. I bet you're still confused about a lot of things, huh?”

She looks at him. “My body is going through some changes I don't understand,” she says, flat.

Asaamu laughs at that, harder than it deserves, hard enough he topples backwards off the flagpole. He does a flip on his way down and lands lightly on his toes, then bows, bright scarf a banner behind him.

Rust has never once managed that easy elegance of motion. She scowls.

“Let me show you around, baby Guardian!” Asaamu calls. “Hunters know all the best Tower secrets.”

“Every Warlock I have met so far would disagree with that,” Rust calls back down. She drops, and six feet from the ground gathers power to her to strip the velocity from her fall. Her hems settle around her ankles slowly.

Asaamu does, actually, know a lot of interesting out-of-the-way spots in the Tower. There's an alley behind a few civilian apartments where there's a cat who'll let you pet it if you blink it at it very slowly. There's a window high up in one of the smaller hangars, reached by a Light-boosted vault over half-disassembled jumpships, where you can watch the Titans in a training ground make the reinforced walls shake. There's a ramen shop in the north shopping district, open to the air – that one's not a secret, it's just really, really good.

There's a way to get on top of the vaults, and if you concentrate hard enough, you can feel the pulses of transmat energy as Guardians pick up or drop off their weapons.

“I knew a Titan,” says Asaamu, reclining on a vault roof, “who – swear on my Ghost – could tell the difference between different makes of guns. Could tell a SUROS shotgun from an Omolon. Could tell if it was _loaded_ or not when it was put away. Thought they were making it up for the longest time.”

“Were they?”

Asaamu lets out a whistling sigh. “Nah. I snuck into the vault core while they were doing it once. Called every single one right. I lost a lot of Glimmer on that one. And Zavala caught me 'tampering,' so I was doing scrub patrols in a swamp on Venus for a month.”

Rust laughs. 

Asaamu nudges her. “Hey, have you found anything cool in the Tower? Fresh eyes and all that.”

She eyes him. “I'm not showing you the locked archives,” she says, amused. “You'll need a longer con to pull that one off.”

The Warlock archives are a marvel – high rooms of texts written by Warlocks of all orders, discourses on Hive hierarchy and Vex mechabiology side by side with journals of philosophy on the exact nature of reality. They have physical samples of strange things from all over the solar system – most patrolling Warlocks, once they're done puzzling over whatever it is that they've found, drop their finds off with their notes written up. Rust doesn't actually have access to the locked rooms yet, only knows what she's been told: they're full of the strangest, most dangerous things in the galaxy, and you need Ikora Rey herself to key you to the locks.

Rust had been shown around the wider archives by an exo Warlock named Tertiaire-5, who had commented that to her it always seemed “like a museum, or a temple to the Light.” Another Warlock, passing with a tray of buzzing Golden Age artifacts, had paused then to argue with that. Tertiaire's Ghost showed up after that with a third point, loudly disagreeing with both of them.

A week into her new life, Rust had mostly stood there and absorbed it, though she interjected for clarification a few times. That netted her a three-part lecture with teachers who couldn't even agree on a topic.

Rust had left the archives with a list of texts as long as her arm and a feeling that she would enjoy herself there.

On the vault's roof, Asaamu thumps a closed fist against Rust's shoulder. “You're stalling,” he accuses, “because you don't actually have anything to show me.”

Rust rolls her eyes. “Try that one on someone else, please.”

Asaamu stills for a moment. Then “Yeah,” he says, shaking: “you weren't born _yesterday_!”

This time Rust pushes him off the roof. 

She shows him a ledge, overshadowed by some jutting bits of architecture. Buttresses, maybe. It takes a careful climb and a boosted jump to reach it, but once you're settled, nobody on the Tower or in the city can see you.

“A jumpship coming in low enough could spot us,” Rust says, eyeing the horizon critically. “And sometimes a Ghost'll fly by. Once a group of Hunters playing drop chicken passed on their way down but I don't think they saw me.”

Asaamu shifts. He manages to give the impression of a careless sprawl on a ledge six inches deep, which is, admittedly, impressive. “How'd you find this place?”

“Fell off the Tower,” she says. “I was up a few floors, exploring around the walls to get my bearings and tried to jump up to the next level. Didn't have a firm grasp on the Light yet and fell, but caught myself in enough time to boost myself up to this ledge. Realized after a while what a good ledge it is.”

She gives the ledge a friendly pat. Asaamu eyes her.

“A precocious Guardian,” he says, putting a mournful tone in his voice. “You're supposed to be older before you start getting so weird.”

Rust shrugs. “That's just Warlocks, I hear.”

Asaamu points at her. “There's a difference between metaphysical Warlock weird and plain old Guardian weird.”

There's a breeze, and it winds its way into their corner, carrying pollen and a few brave flies with it. With the sun gone down, the Traveler's sides are blue and pink from the neon signs in the city, the lights brightest right underneath it, the buildings nearly tall enough to touch it.

“Hey,” says Asaamu, finally. “Have you ever played drop chicken?”

“That's for adrenaline-junkie sparrow jockeys who can't think of productive ways to spend their time,” she tells him, lofty. She raises her chin and waits.

He looks at her. She looks back. His eyebrows rise slowly to meet the edge of his hood.

One corner of Rust's mouth ticks up.

“You really are way too young to be like this,” he tells her, and grins. “Last one down has to make the excuses to the Vanguard.”

They jump together.


	3. NPCs

Step 3: Train Up 

> “Can't do anything with a jammed gun. Can't do anything with a dull blade – well, you can, but you shouldn't. Hone yourself, Guardian. Shaxx has a whetstone for you.” –Cayde-6

Lord Shaxx is the single biggest person Rust has ever seen. A small mountain range, rumbling over paperwork.

 _A planetoid_ , says her Ghost into her ear. Like the Vanguard, who each give off their own gravity.

Like Ikora Rey, at his desk, looking him up and down with interest.

Rust had been haggling over bounties with Arcite in the afternoon lull when she'd felt Ikora come up behind – a fierce column of Light in her awareness, nearly blinding.

“Lord Shaxx,” says Ikora.

Shaxx looks up from his work. “Lady Ikora,” he says. “Any news?”

“For once, no,” she says. “No, Shaxx. This time I was thinking – it has been a while since we sparred, hasn't it?”

Rust, across the floor, catches her breath. Shaxx stands up. His chair clatters to the ground behind him, in the long moment of silence before his booming answer: “Ikora! I would be honoured! And I'll wipe the floor with you this time!”

Ikora stands unruffled. She tilts her head, and says, in an even tone, “You'll try. Bannerfall?”

“Excellent choice!” Shaxx claps Ikora on the shoulder. Rust can't say she wouldn't buckle under that enormous hand; Ikora only glances down at it, then up again, cool. 

Shaxx strides out of the hall, and behind her Arcite 99-40 moves. He sets his slate down, and says to her, “Pardon me. Pardon me. I'll be needed in the Crucible, Warlock.”

He leaves too. 

Ikora turns around, and there's the faint mark of a smile in the crease of her cheek. “Well, Guardian?” she says. “What are you waiting for? Go get your fellows. It's going to be quite a show.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Rust breathes. She looks to her Ghost, and together they dart out of the hall.

As soon as they're up the stairs her Ghost gets into the Warlock hall communication system. “Ikora Rey is holding an exhibition match,” he says, talking quickly as they go. “Bannerfall, with Lord Shaxx, probably as soon as they get set up. See you there!”

A Titan she knows is scowling at a vault interface, and Rust swerves to snag her by the pauldron. “Cix!” she says. “Is your sparrow still broken?”

Cix is human, dark brown, barely younger than Rust, forever forgetting to re-dye her hair. She'd crashed her sparrow magnificently off a building in the Manhattan nuclear zone a week ago, and her Ghost had had to transmat it back to the Tower in pieces. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Why, you need a lift somewhere?”

“No,” says Rust, impatient: “Shaxx, Ikora, exhibition match, I'll give you a lift but I'm taking the shortcut off the Tower.”

“I hate the shortcut,” says Cix, “–But for that it's worth it, let's go!”

Cix slaps at the vault screen and it shuts off with an angry buzz. Rust is already pacing towards the railing, Ghost trailing after.

“I thought Cix was supposed to be your sensible teammate,” he says, forlorn.

It's impossible to get flight clearance from the hangar frames just to get across the City itself; for local travel, the best way is by sparrow. The quickest way to Bannerfall tower is to get off the Tower, cut through the older, narrower streets, and follow a particular creek till the wall.

The quickest way off the Tower is to jump.

A moment before Rust hops the railing, her Ghost decorporealizes in protest.

It's a long fall, exhilarating – Rust laughs the whole way down. Fifteen feet from the ground, she calls out: “Sparrow, please!”

Ten feet up, she gathers her Light to her. Five, and she yanks hard against gravity – so hard she pops a foot back upwards before descending more gently to land on her sparrow, the last light of transmat still spilling off its sides.

“I wish you'd realize I don't actually enjoy having to make you a new body,” says her Ghost in her ear. “I hate trust falls.”

To their left, Cix slams into the ground, Light-shield focused underneath to cushion her from the impact.

Newer lanes in the City are built broad, room for aircars and animals and open-air shop stalls, but some of the older ones barely have room for two people to walk together. That's just enough space for a sparrow, though, and Rust takes them careening through back alleys, ramping over a board left propped against some crates, around someone's chicken coop, and spraying through the shallow end of the creek.

Rust skids to a stop at Bannerfall's base. They climb off, and the sparrow dematerializes from under them.

“Thanks, Ghost,” Rust says. To Cix, she says: “Race you?”

Cix breaks out into a grin. “Hell yes,” she says, and shakes out her wrists. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Cix counts them off, and on one they leap – after their first burst of acceleration, it's a quick scramble to get a hand- or foot-hold and push themselves upwards for another jump. It's a close run, but Cix just accelerates faster – she's got greater mass in her gear and she's got this trick she says is like _putting the Light in your boot and stomping_ that Rust just can't get to work. Well: she's better at falling.

( _That's not a good thing_ , her Ghost tells her.

 _Sorry_ , she says; _I'll go slow on the way back_.)

Rust hurdles the last railing and lets herself land on Cix, who staggers. “One day I'll beat you,” she tells her, and thumps her shoulder with a fist.

“One day the Speaker will take his mask off and tell us a bedtime story!”

Bannerfall Tower is an arena these days, which means the frames keep it structurally sound, but there are bullet holes and scorch marks just about everywhere. Somehow, ivy still hangs onto the buildings, and a few trees show green in their pots.

They climb up to a roof at a more reasonable pace. Cix shimmies the lock on the door at the top of a disused stairwell and they open the door. There's a shape moving on the roof – Asaamu, a Hunter they know, giving them a look of deep self-satisfaction.

“ _How_ ,” Cix says.

Asaamu offers them a smile. “Hunter secrets,” he says, lofty, lounging on a rolled-up carpet. 

Cix's gauntlet creaks.

“All right, Orha messaged me and I was already on this side of the city.”

Cix snorts.

They settle themselves on the roof's edge, and watch as three Crucible frames sweep through the area, getting it ready. Other Guardians start streaming in, mostly Warlocks trailing their fireteams behind them. 

There's a certain feeling Rust gets out in the field when she's working with a team, something bubbling in her chest – something that makes her reckless, makes her laugh and talk and take risks in battle. Sitting here with Guardians she knows, surrounded by others, to watch her Vanguard leader and Shaxx fight – it's not the same thing, but it feels close.

Asaamu nudges Rust. “Hey,” he murmurs, “Is that–?”

He nods upwards, towards the top of an ancient satellite dish. Rust shades her eyes with one hand and catches a glint of blue under a threadbare hood.

“Huh,” she says. Looks like Cayde-6 is waiting for the match, too.

The frames set timers on the last of the ammo transmatters and clear the area.

With Shaxx occupied, Arcite 99-40 commentates, embellishing the usual disclaimer with a warning for the audience about splash damage. “Nothing barred but Ghost interference,” he adds.

The horn goes off, and every spectator hushes. Cix elbows Rust viciously to point out the gleam of an incoming transmat in the western quadrant. No telling which combatant yet.

There's near a minute of silence, as Shaxx and Ikora try to find and get an angle on each other. Rust sees purple fabric flash – Ikora ducking into a building, then out an upper window on the other side. Moments after that, on a sidestreet Rust can't quite see: an explosion, and a shockwave of energy that has her bracing against the roof where she sits.

 _I felt that in my quanta_ , says her Ghost to her, through the noise of the watching crowd.

Arcite 99-40 announces: “Both teams down.”

* * *

Both of them close-range fighters by preference, in each round Ikora and Shaxx circle the arena until they get an angle on the other, and then close the distance to strike as fast as possible.

Ikora is never where Shaxx puts his sword, ducking around to put a shotgun shell in his back. Shaxx takes everything she's got and keeps going, making the air shimmer and the ambient temperature of the arena rise from his use of the Sun's light.

Ikora leaps from a tall window, and Shaxx is there waiting for her on the ground, feet planted, sword up. He sends a burst of burning Light at her – Ikora dodges barely in time, and when she lands on the ground, shotgun up, already raising a hand to blind Shaxx with a grenade, her coat is smoldering.

Shaxx sweeps his sword low: Ikora jumps to dodge it, and Shaxx lashes out with his other fist, and solar Light with it. 

Ikora comes down to land on the flat of Shaxx's blade and flips off it again to land behind him. She takes a hit to the knee when Shaxx turns around to face her, but in the next moment a bloom of void energy lights up the arena, and Shaxx – disintegrates. The light takes a long time to fade, swirling in on itself. When it goes, there isn't a mark left on the ground.

“Pure showboating,” Asaamu mutters, but he's leaning just as far forward as Rust, as rapt as the rest of them.

* * *

Ikora goes for Shaxx's remaining horn, and it's not a feint. Shaxx rears back and away from the blast, sword coming up between them. Ikora rolls away and comes back up shotgun at the ready.

Shaxx's laugh sounds, fierce, through the arena. “You'll not get that one!” he shouts, and charges.

Silent till now, Ikora calls back, amplified by Arcite's speakers: “That's what you said last time!”

The fighters come together, fall away, clash again. Another flurry of action: at the end of it, a tree is on fire, Ikora is crouching, clutching at her bloody side and breathing hard, and Shaxx is unmoving on the ground.

* * *

“Match point,” Arcite announces.

The last round, if Ikora can grab the win. Shaxx wary in an open area, sword held in guard position. Ikora coming from a side alley, shotgun in one hand and void light pulsing in the other. She stops to aim, and Shaxx comes barreling in, sword out, to get under her guard. There's absolute silence across the rooftops as Ikora waits – waits – waits – and raises her shotgun high in the air. She tosses the handful of void light underhand and, as Shaxx vaults over the grenade, lightning comes down to meet her from the clear sky. It crackles through the metal of the gun, through Ikora, lifting her high into the air on the power of that arc charge, and slams down onto Shaxx. 

By the time Rust blinks the light out of her eyes, Ikora's on the ground in the square, kneeling over Shaxx, the business end of her shotgun pressed into the underside of his helmet. Shaxx's sword is twenty feet away, lodged deep in a tree and smoking.

The roar of every watching Guardian drowns out Arcite's next piece of commentary.

Shaxx surges up underneath Ikora. She slams him back down, horned helmet bouncing against the old stone floor, and pulls the trigger.

The noise of the crowd is a Cabal drop pod crashing down right on Rust in that wait for Shaxx's ghost to resurrect him, extended in time – that last long instant of nothing but screaming heat and pressure before the blackout, stretched out five heartbeats till Shaxx's return in a crash of Light.

Then it gets louder.

Ikora stands up. 

Rust can't hear her own raw-throated cheering through the crowd, but Shaxx's laugh cuts through it all. 

“Match to beta team,” says Arcite, over the speakers. “ _Merciless_!”

Above them, sitting on the satellite, Cayde-6 whoops.

Down in the street, Ikora holsters her shotgun. She reaches up and claps Shaxx's shoulder. They stand there a moment, then move together out of the arena.

* * *

The next week in the Tower, Rust back from Mars with reports on Vex movement underground. She makes her report to Ikora, and Ikora nods to her: a dismissal. Rust can't help but hesitate, though.

“Yes, Warlock?”

“About last week,” Rust says. “I've never heard of anyone calling two elements at once. I didn't know it was possible.”

Ikora looks her over. Behind her, at his seat at the Vanguard's long table, Cayde-6 is looking at them, with an expression Rust doesn't know how to interpret.

“It shouldn't be,” Ikora says, eventually. “We teach that a Warlock has to give herself wholly over to her element. And that's true. But it is also possible to be two different things at the same time.”

Rust just nods, something in her throat keeping her from speaking.

“For that, you need absolute mastery of each element separately, and of yourself,” Ikora continues. She gives Rust an assessing once-over. “And I mean absolute. Your connection to void is strong, but you struggle to touch the Sun. Go to Mercury, and meditate in its light. Then we'll see.”

“Yes, Vanguard,” says Rust. She near floats out of the hall with joy, the knowledge that if she does well enough Ikora will teach her something personally. She passes Shaxx at his desk on her way out, going through the contents of an Omolon-branded crate with a Tower frame. 

Shaxx, never without his helmet, never without his equipment in anything less than perfect fighting condition, has left a scorch mark untouched on his horn.


	4. Fireteam

Step 4: Group Up

> “No Guardian can do everything alone. Find companions to watch your back. Watch theirs. They are your surest armour.” –Zavala

On the Dreadnaught, hunting Taken. Four of them: Rust and Orha, Warlocks; Asaamu, a Hunter; and Cix, a Titan, to hold them steady.

Supplies to bring to the Dreadnaught: as much ammo as you and your Ghost can cache within transmat distance. Food that keeps, because you never know. Extra lights, ditto. And a group of Guardians you can trust, because having someone there with you keeps the warmth lit in your chest when the Hive would steal it from you.

“You never named your Ghost, did you?” Orha asks. Their own Ghost, Nhour, hovers to their left, lighting the way.

Rust's Ghost floats forward. “She barely named herself,” he says. “Let me tell you, it took her two hours altogether, and look what she picked!”

“It's a good name. Short, easy to shout,” says Rust, and reaches for her Ghost. She cups him in her hands, and the light of his eye makes a puddle of blue against her gauntlets. “Did you want one? I didn't ever ask, did I?”

Her Ghost rolls over in her palm. “No, if I wanted one I'd pick one, don't fuss. Just teasing, Guardian.”

“What a pair,” says Nhour. “Formal enough for a royal dinner on the Reef.”

From behind them, Asaamu says, like it's being pulled out of him, “ _Oh_ man.”

“Oh?”

“Dinners on the Reef. Uh. One of Cayde's stories.”

“Oh, now you have to tell.” Cix takes hold of his cloak and tugs at it.

“I really don't,” says Asaamu, hasty, twitching out of Cix's grip. “I don't have the kind of glimmer to pay him back for spilling, and also, I think I hear something ahead, I'm going to go scout, alright, bye–”

He takes off, long strides carrying him quickly out of sight.

Nhour does a little dive-and-roll, an aerial laugh. She tells them all: “Cayde thinks that story is anything like a secret, but you should heard what his Ghost told me about it. That Hunter tries her patience to no end.”

Ahead, Asaamu yelps, and something else roars.

They break into a run.

* * *

“You know what someone once told me?” Cix asks suddenly, sword wedged halfway through a Hive Knight's abdomen. “It was some exo in a dive bar, getting maudlin on graphite. She said that the Fallen once had the Traveler – that's why they're called that, y'know – so it's possible they once had Guardians. Ghosts, connection to the Light, everything. That's weird, right?”

They all pause for a moment. Asaamu shoots an incoming thrall. Its head explodes. “Four arms,” he says, meditatively.

“Two rifles,” Rust adds.

Cix kicks the Knight's corpse off her blade. It makes an awful cartilaginous noise as it goes. 

“Four swords,” she says.

“Hell yes,” Asaamu breathes.

A fresh horde of thrall nearly gets the jump on them, standing there contemplating that perfect image.

* * *

They're passing through another one of those corridors like the inside of a spine, and the arches above them change shape with the bobbing of their light.

“But what if,” Asaamu persists. “There's so much we're told to take on faith – we've got to interrogate that.”

Rust scratches at a flaking bit of dried Hive blood (or bile, or some other unnamed fluid) on her helmet. “Not to step too far into the Praxic meeting room,” she says, “But would it make a difference? I mean: would it change the actions you felt compelled to take?”

Cix laughs. Orha shakes their head in the way that means that under their helmet, they're rolling their eyes.

“I'll shout it out with you once I'm not knee-deep in worm slime,” Rust says. “But I could decide either way and I'd still be here, covered in slime, because I've decided it's the right thing to do. However that decision has been affected by ancient forces living outside our conception of reality.”

“And if it does turn out we're the puppets of something even worse than Oryx?”

This is a conversation Asaamu would usually have with Rust or Orha perched on an unlikely bit of roof, basking like a lizard in the sun. It feels different here, in the sickly dark of the Dreadnaught.

Orha breaks in: “' _Then I'll punch that too_.' Wei Ning. Excellent Titan philosopher.”

“It's all that time standing in bubbles while everyone else is running around doing all the work,” Cix puts in cheerfully. “It's crochet or philosophy and the last time I crocheted on patrol I got psion guts all over my project.”

“Because you weren't paying attention to anything else and you let an entire thresher get the drop on you,” says Orha.

Cix raises a finger. It's close enough to Vanguard handsign they all stop, but it's just Cix pausing for emphasis.

“Don't let the Warlocks fool you,” she tells them. “Philosophy is much easier than fiber arts, and you never have to wash it after using it to strangle a Cabal soldier.”

Asaamu ducks to the front of the group. “Except figuratively, sometimes,” he says, and Rust looks at him with relief. She reaches up to brush some crumbled wormspore off his shoulder, relic of an ogre tossing him into a wall.

“I'll leave the figuring to the Titans,” Orha tells him, and claps his back in passing, on their way to scout out a side room.

* * *

Rust trips over a worm emerging from a hole in the floor. It makes a high-pitched noise. In response, so does she.

She puts her bootheel through its head.

It thrashes.

She shoots it.

“Whoa, hold up there, Warlock,” says Asaamu, clearly holding back a laugh. “Aren't you supposed to be all into the creepy shit, or something?”

“It's interesting, but I'd be glad for it to be interesting from a distance,” she says. It's hard to affect stiff dignity with an empty pistol and a boot covered in worm intestines, but Rust does her absolute best.

“Yeah, 'Saamu,” says Orha, leaning in. “Rust is cool, calm, collected, scientifically fascinated, and definitely not freaked out at all.”

“I'm quitting this fireteam,” Rust tells them. She concentrates on reloading her pistol, even though it uses finicky Golden Age tech that doesn't appreciate her interference. “I'm going to throw my bond off Felwinter Peak and go and raise goats in Old Chicago.”

“You'll get richer than the New Monarchy off selling jerky, and then we'll all be sorry.” Asaamu's grin is audible.

“Oh, you will be,” says Rust, and swings her pistol up right at him.

Asaamu ducks – the boomer-shot from the Knight coming up behind him goes wide. Rust puts a bullet into each of its eyes: _tap-tap-tap_. It goes down.

On its way down, it showers Asaamu in green fluid that stinks even through their helmet filters.

“ _Ugh_ ,” he says.

Rust tilts her chin at him.

“Fuck, fine, I'll be right there raising goats with you and the only gross liquids that touch us will be Earth-indigenous, we good?”

“No,” Cix calls from up ahead. “I need an assist, get your sorry Light-forsaken asses up here!”

Rust grins under her helmet, where the others can't see. “Now we're good,” she tells Asaamu.

* * *

They're hunting Surnon, called Darksong: a Taken Wizard. It's nearly impossible to track down a single creature here – its presence drowned out by the sheer mental pressure of the Dreadnaught itself.

“No footprints, either, not with a Wizard,” grumbles Orha. “Couldn't be that easy.”

“Shhh,” says Asaamu, absently. “Do you hear that?”

Rust's on the verge of asking _hear what_ when she does hear it – a Wizard's scream in the distance.

“Heads up,” she says, and checks her safety.

They round a corner in time for a Wizard's frayed hems to dart out of sight again, the hallway they came from ending abruptly in a ledge, and underneath it a vast hall lit only by the eyes of the Hive in it. There's a sea of them, thrall and acolytes alike, all facing away from them, watched over by a nearly ogre-sized Knight kneeling in front of a humming green crystal. A Hive ritual, one they've never seen before. Nhour, the only Ghost currently lighting their way, decorporealizes on seeing it.

“Well,” says Cix, sounding awed. “Look at that.”

“Around or through?” Rust asks them.

Asaamu rattles a brief rhythm against his holster. “Through,” he says.

“Through,” says Orha. “We go around and we're going to get lost and lose track of that Wizard again.”

“Through,” says Cix. “That crystal looks like trouble.”

_Crystals are_ always _trouble_ , Rust's Ghost says privately to her.

Rust sends back a sympathetic _sorry, Ghost_ , and says out loud, “Majority, then. Ready up.”

Cix swings a weapon around from her back – a rocket launcher, half as tall as she is. “Asaamu, Orha, you move around to the other side while I shake them up, then Rust'n'I'll go from here.”

“Got it,” Asaamu says, and he and Orha drop over the side of the ledge and out of sight.

Cix braces the launcher on her shoulder. Rust summons Light to each hand, and it hisses as she condenses it slowly into something explosive. An acolyte below twitches at the sound, but doesn't look up, still gazing right at the crystal.

It does look up when a rocket whines past its head, over the field of Hive, to slam into the crystal. The crystal wobbles on its axis, darker cracks radiating out from the point of contact. Lines too thin for it to crack apart just yet, or for it to stop humming.

Cix makes a frustrated noise and reloads. The enormous Knight heaves itself to its feet and roars, and every Hive behind roars with it.

Rust sends one bomb out over the Hive to make the Knight flinch, and drops one below the ledge at her feet to clear a space for her and Cix. She lets Cix jump first and charge ahead into the crowd, slamming Hive to the ground, and follows behind to mop up the stunned thrall in her wake.

She once read that the Iron Lords called it the battlehum, the rhythm of the fight a Guardian can sink into – move ahead, check her back, check Cix's, duck that shot, implode that acolyte, breathe in, reload, breathe out, empty the clip one at a time into the wave of approaching thrall, quickly but without panic. Keep to the rhythm long enough and the battlehum sinks into your head, drowning out conscious thought.

Orha and Asaamu far off on the hall's eastern end, the crackle of lightning turning Hive to ash. Cix closer by, trading blows with the Knight towering over her. Something feels wrong there, Cix getting pushed back too far with each blow. Acolyte coming up behind her – Rust shoots it and starts leaping over Hive, corpse and living, to get closer to Cix. Thirty feet away and that massive Knight backhands Cix with its sword, and she goes flying, limp, to land where – Rust can't see, but there's a sound of an explosion behind her. She does what she can, which is slide up under the Knight's guard and slap a grenade upwards. The grenade hits the underside of the Knight's chin with a burst of purple light, and it stumbles back a step and knocks into that strange crystal.

The room behind them is lit intermittently with flashes of her fireteam's Light, and the Knight in front of her looms backlit by that cracked, humming crystal.

Rust empties her gun into it.

Next to her, the flicker of a Ghost's Light, and Cix reappears, glowing, furious, and laughing. She comes up from the revival swinging – she winds up with her rocket launcher, slams it like a bat into the Knight's jaw, and with the impact comes a terrible crack of bone.

The Knight falls to its knees. Cix juggles her gear, and takes its head off with her sword.

“What was that?” asks Rust, as she puts a few more bullets into the Knight's body, just to make sure.

“Landed on a fallen boomer. I didn't even know impact could make them pop.” Cix kneels down and checks her launcher. “Weirdest way I've gone in – well, months, at least.”

Without another word, she sends another rocket into the crystal: point-blank range. This time the crystal shatters, the hum rising unbearably before it cuts out, and the combined flash from the ordnance and the energy released from the crystal whites out Rust's vision.

“Ah, damn,” Cix mutters beside her, on the floor. Rust shakes her head to try to clear it, but it mostly just makes her dizzy. Cix grabs a handful of Rust's coat to haul herself up. Rust, not braced for it, nearly falls over.

“Back up, you two,” says Orha, sharp. They do, Rust half-stumbling backwards over the Knight's outstretched wrist on the ground as she goes.

Shapes reenter her vision slowly. First a blurry sense of light and dark, then colour. Then a noise clarifies what she's seeing for her.

The noise: a Wizard's shriek, at piercing volume, only feet away from her. Floating above the shards of the crystal, pulling energy from it in a green vortex, is a Taken Wizard.

“I, uh. I think we found Surnon, team,” Asaamu says. Orha flanks him, Arc energy still crackling over their mechanical joints.

Rust blinks the last of the daze from her eyes and ejects her rifle's spent clip. It clatters as it falls, bouncing over the Knight's corpse and its dropped sword.

“Heads up,” she says. All around her, they raise their weapons and their Light, and in front of them, the Wizard cloaks itself in power.

They're ready for it.


	5. Vanguard

Step 5: Call the Storm

> “Try to bend it to your will, and you'll shatter. But flow with it, and let it flow through you, and let your aims and electrons align: you'll be lightning.” –Ikora Rey

Rust's connection to void has been strong since her rebirth in Light, the emptiness and energy-potential of spacetime dripping easily from her hands. Despite her efforts, though, she's never managed to touch solar for more than a moment or two at a time; she aims for fireballs and gets a few orange sparks dancing across her palms. A few Guardians she knows, who read meaning into things like the movement of lightning through clouds, tell her it's because she's Awoken and touched by the dark, guarded parts of the Reef, and because she was reborn in a particular area of the Cosmodrome, in the shade. Cix had heard that, out on patrol in the Giant's Pass, and laughed in that way of hers that uprooted all Rust's frustrations at once.

“You've got to be able to think in straight lines to match the Sun!” she'd said. “That's all there is to it. Rust, I've never once heard you go from point A to B without swerving by Q along the way. It's got nothing to do with where your Ghost found you – get Orha to show you the statistics on Guardian-to-Light connection, I know they've got them.”

Then she'd made a bet with Rust over how many Cabal she could knock over with a single solar hammer. Terrapin bowling, Cix called it.

* * *

The latest news over the subspace network: a group of Fallen has holed up in an old university campus on Venus, trying to tap Golden Age information from the servers. Ikora Rey calls her personally to send her over. At the sound of her voice, Rust nearly falls off her perch, an eightieth-floor balcony in a suburban quarter of the Ishtar Sink. She'd been under a neuralead tarp, keeping tabs on enemy movement in the area, watching a House Devils squad dig itself in behind a ridge.

“We don't know what they're looking for in that sector of the campus, or even what could be there to interest them,” Ikora tells her, voice crisp. “But it's a sure bet that whatever advantage they're looking for would be used against us. Disadvantage them, Guardian.”

Rust leaves her nest on the balcony, scattering old leaves from the vines crawling all over the block over her tarp and pack. She winds through the long hallways to the back of the building, the light falling through the broken windows in soft-edged pillars, and slides down an elevator shaft to make her exit into the air. Fallen scavengers picked the habitats clean decades ago, no reason for anyone to come back along to this particular building if Rust doesn't draw their attention to it. She ducks through a few streets and through an old drainage pipe to the side of a lake, boots stirring up silt in the water as she passes, before her Ghost transmats her sparrow down to her.

There are a few fireteams on-planet, keeping a visible Guardian presence active as a deterrent, and keeping an eyes on hostile forces.

“Think we need backup?” she asks her Ghost, as her sparrow slaloms through rust-orange creeks. 

“I shouldn't think we'll need help with a few measly Fallen, but there's no reason to not let the others know we're around. Just in case we want some help later, you know.”

“Sounds good. Patch me in?”

Her Ghost does, and Rust checks the list of teams in the local sector. “Fireteams, ah: Lean Beans, Temporis, and Vexed Mythoclast – this is the Warlock Rust on single detachment. I'm on my way to Campus 3 to clear out some Fallen. Shouldn't need an assist, but if you don't hear back from me by nightfall in this hemisphere, I'd appreciate a ping.”

“You got it, Warlock,” one member of Temporis says, and the Lean Beans send a nonverbal acknowledgement over the line.

“Don't get yourself into trouble, Rust!” the Vexed Mythoclast leader tells her, in a familiar voice: a Hunter Rust knows, whose fireteam's usual beat is Saturn's moons.

“Sauda!” Rust says. She slows her sparrow down a touch. “What are you doing out here?”

“Shepherding a bunch of babies through the Vex ravines so they don't fall down a hole and die of exposure on a loop for a decade,” Sauda grumbles, with a laugh half-hidden in the back of her voice. “In my day you got a gun and they kicked you out of a jumpship into the Urals till you could make your way back to the Tower on your own.”

This is a game Rust is used to, Sauda something like six hundred years old and happy to use it against younger Guardians. Rust still gets it from her, when there's nobody younger around. “I know, and in your day they made you climb Felwinter Peak without any gloves to toughen you up, too.”

“I don't know what Ghosts these days are looking for in their Guardians,” Sauda says, cheerfully self-righteous, before another voice cuts in on the line.

“Warlock Rust, hi: this is the Titan Olivine-9. Hunter Sauda is a liar and a terrible teacher, can we just come kill some bugs with you instead?”

“You're better off learning your way through those ravines, and consider the time with Sauda an education in coping with Hunters,” Rust tells them, and cuts the line before Sauda or her charges can protest. Under her helmet, she smiles.

“Sauda's going to throw you off the Tower next time she sees you,” says Rust's Ghost, amused.

“She can try.”

* * *

Rust has meditated on the burnt plains of Mercury, trying to touch the Sun. She's gone and studied with the Sunbreakers, carefully eliding her contact with the rogue sect in her reports to Ikora, who carefully didn't ask. 

She read the theories, the philosophies, and practiced as much as she could. It didn't take. Knew it was unlikely for any Guardian to be able to use more than one kind of Light, couldn't keep herself from trying.

Ikora never tells her to stop. But she does start guiding her efforts in another direction: towards the study of arc Light. Ikora takes her out onto a Tower plaza, points out the stormclouds hanging like a curtain around the Traveler. Gives her a lecture.

“I trust you will apply yourself to these studies as diligently as you have applied yourself to your study of the Sun's power, Guardian,” says Ikora Rey.

Rust thinks about Cix, and Cix's theories on Guardians' powers, and the way lightning passes jagged through clouds, finding its way in unpredictable logic. She thinks about how it leaps towards itself, jumping through gaps from ground to sky. She thinks about the sudden drop of atmospheric pressure before a storm, and she thinks, _Oh, this will suit me just fine._

She says, “Yes, Vanguard.”

* * *

Another twenty minutes' sparrow-ride takes them to Campus 3, its buildings tilted on their bases, leaning into the swamp. There's a sculpture, a representation of knowledge in human form, in the main courtyard. Half of it is broken and sitting under the dirty water, and the rest of it draped in sheets of hanging moss.

“Heat signatures marking Fallen in two buildings,” her Ghost says, and lights up her HUD. “They're probably in that one, there's more of them going further in.”

“Then the other's an extra angle for lookouts,” Rust says. She drifts as quietly as she can around the side of the emptier building, makes her way to where the scouts are. She takes them out from behind with blunt force, and drops to a knee to pick off the Fallen in the front of the other building with her scout. With luck, the Fallen trying to tap the university's databanks won't know she's there till she's on top of them.

Rust and her Ghost are two narrow utility corridors deep into the main building when they learn exactly how lucky they aren't. Fallen pour in from emergency exits behind and in front of her, armed with shock knives and arc spears, running fast and low to the ground.

The first vandal reaches her, its elbow a spring jabbing a spear towards her gut, and Rust thinks, _huh_. Feeling like she's moving in half-time, she puts her hand up to slide along the flat of the spear's blade. The arc charge hits her hand, makes the jump through millimetres of air. Instead of burning along her nerves, it sings, and Rust pushes it, pushes with it, and sends that arc charge back around into the vandal's six-chambered heart to stop it. The rest of the spear's charge leaps through the air to hit a dreg behind, and to the dreg behind that, till the charge runs out and the spear falls dark and scorch-tipped to the ground.

“Huh,” Rust says again, out loud this time, and straightens up. She clears the rest of the utility corridor pretty soon after that.

* * *

There's a small order of Warlocks dedicated to studying the mysteries of arc Light; they call themselves the Fulgurites, and the smell of ozone trails after them in the Tower.

These days sometimes Rust turns around and catches a faint whiff on her gear. She trains, begging lessons from Orha in exchange for a lesson on her curveball nova trick.

On a sweep patrol at the feet of the Atlas range, Orha shows her the stormtrance, tells her to watch as they pull power from the weather system and spin pure Light into arc. The Hive have dug themselves into the caves here, and Orha burns through three rooms of thrall by themself, hanging in the Light's grip.

They sink back down to the ground, after, and say to Rust: “Now you.”

Rust doesn't reach the trance that day, can feel her mental grasp slipping off it as she approaches. But she does produce what Orha calls, oral backlights flickering, a perfectly respectable grenade.

* * *

The Fallen are in the first sub-basement, a vast high room rimmed with walkways, its floor hidden under water. The thick algae sitting on its surface is freshly broken in long rippling streaks, and the dregs are smeared damp green clear to their upper shoulders. A captain twice their height paces behind them, on a rusted platform above the water. 

The dregs have cords of their own patched into the campus' arm-thick cables, hooked up to data storage cubes.

Rust watches them from above, the entrance to the first basement behind her. Shank drones buzz around, watching the perimeter, none of them sensing her yet.

She murmurs to her Ghost, volume low so her helmet won't project the sound into the room: “Why aren't they in the server rooms? This seems inefficient for them.”

“Sunk in the last quake, a few years back. Now it's full of nothing but mud – I guess they figured this is easier than rigging a way to drain it.”

“Huh. And the servers themselves are fine?”

“Golden Age tech,” her Ghost sighs, jealous. “Works upside-down, in vacuum, or under thirty feet of swamp. Ready?”

“Ready.”

She drops an arc grenade into the murky water below, and the charge spreads in pulses to stun a good half-dozen of the Fallen. Then she jumps the railing, and the fight begins.

The dregs and vandals swarm her, shanks staying back to take shots at her from a distance. Rust shoots one, two, three Fallen before a vandal lands a hit, and she ducks out of the way of another, launches herself up onto a desk, from there to the next platform. The captain, on the other side of the room, shakes his arms out and roars at her.

Rust shoots as many Fallen as she can before they reach her new platform, and then it's back to hand-to-hand, using her Light to multiply the force of her blows. A shank-shot goes wide as she dodges, and Rust feels it as it passes and pulls at it, brings its energy back around to slam into the back of a vandal's skull.

She's dodging between desks on a reload when she feels the electric buzz, low against her mind. Rust ducks, expecting another shot to pass overhead, but the buzz doesn't go away. A vandal gets in her way, and she takes it down almost absently, concentrating on that low buzz. It's – directional. She follows it.

“Not a great time for whatever personal revelation you're having!” her Ghost says, but then Rust catches at it, whatever it is, and the lights flicker.

“That's the... building generator?”

“Obviously, now your eight, check your eight!”

On her eight is the captain, looming, silhouette crowned with his horns and ruff. He swings one of his shock-swords at Rust; she blocks it with her arm. Her vambrace comes away chipped. Rust puts four bullets into one of his primary arms to get him to drop a sword, and that gives her the length of a breath to form a messy ball of arc energy in her hand and slam it, directly into the captain's torso.

He backpedals to the edge of the platform, overbalances. Rust shoots him one more time in the stomach, and he falls into the water with an enormous splashing noise like a cannonshot. With his second shock-sword still in hand.

The water crackles again. The captain's ruff, and the algae on it, smokes. 

Rust feels the charge spread through the water under her feet, feels the power of the generator. She feels the vandals' weaponry and the shanks' energy cores, the conductive power of the damp atmosphere and the pure Light inside her, furious, waiting to be tapped.

For the first time, Rust enters stormtrance. 

She pulls positive charge from the ground, negative from the sky above, and hangs between them in a web of lightning. The first slam of power hits the metal platforms, the water underneath it. The captain roars again in agony, and sinks, and doesn't come up again.

The overhead lights go out, but Rust barely notices, the room filled as it is with the light of her trance.

The shanks, the weaponry: Rust reaches out with her power, with the arc Light, and the electricity from the Fallen leaps to her over the gap, closing the circuit, making lightning. Two shanks, their power stolen, their wires burnt out, fall down.

She takes out the last of the Fallen squad all in a single long sweep of lightning, held above the ground in the grip of her own power.

When the basement is quiet except for the remaining charge crawling over her armour, she breathes out, long and low.

Through the receding trance, she says to her Ghost, dreamily: “I feel like I could just keep going on up forever, into the stormclouds themselves.”

Her Ghost blinks his eye at her in disapproval. “You would definitely not survive that, Guardian.”

She can't help but laugh, still bubbling over with charge even as she lowers to meet the ground with her own feet again, on a platform four inches underwater. Her hems go immediately green with algae. “But you'd bring me right back after.”

“If you tried that one on me, I'd make you _wait_.”

Rust laughs again, a hiccuping giggle. She rubs at her knuckles through her gloves, tingling with the memory of power.

“How are you acting like you fried a circuit when you don't have circuits to fry?” her Ghost asks her, exasperated.

“Remember the first time I pulled off a nova bomb? Fell down and laughed for five minutes solid.”

“Oh, yeah,” says her Ghost, glum. “Still weird how organic people react to things sometimes.”

“No argument there, Ghost,” Rust says. She nudges him with the back of a finger, fond.

Rust finds a dry piece of ledge high above the water and sits there, airing her coat out while her Ghost dives into the university datanet. She lets her eyes drift closed, and reaches for that feeling again, of the ebb and flow of energy. Her Ghost is a moon against the tide of the systems' charge, pulling it towards himself and then letting it go again. She can't tell what he sees on the net, only that he's affecting it. She wonders.

Her communication line beeps with the tone that means channel open. “If you're entirely back to yourself? Good work, Guardian, and my congratulations. Ghost, pull everything you can from the networks, and then both of you, make your way back home. I want an in-person debrief.”

Ikora closes the channel.

“Hey,” Rust says. “Think I could learn to do that hacking thing you do, Ghost?”

“ _That hacking thing_ ,” her Ghost huffs, from his position at a terminal. “No. Just – no. You'd just fry all the computers' circuits, too. Might as well give me a gun.”

“Might as well,” says Rust, trying to sound serious, thoughtful. “We could probably ask Banshee about modding your shell.”

Her Ghost's components flare out in alarm, and the shimmer of his connection to the net cuts out. “I – no – oh, come on,” he says, as Rust starts laughing again.

“You're still all goofy on your stormtrance, this is why you don't get to hack things,” he scolds her, as he picks his connection back up. “Leave the work to the responsible member of the fireteam.”

“Alright, if you insist,” she says, giving up on trying not to laugh. Her giggles quiet down, eventually, and Rust watches her Ghost work, the dim basement now lit by his glow alone.


	6. Grimoire

Step 6: Gather Knowledge 

> “If something's important, write it down, or make it sound snappy enough that somebody else wants to. Consider adding a squid for panache.” –first entry in the Pahanin Errata

Rust finds the cards in the Warlock libraries, tucked under the flyleaf of a romance novel called The Exo's Reefborn Lover. They're cut from what looks like scraps of old books, scribbled on the back of posters torn from their staples, speckled with strange materials corroding under tape.

While Warlocks tend to have idiosyncratic organizational systems, the libraries' system is maintained fiercely, occasionally at gunpoint. Rust is browsing through the small selection of Fallen pre-Whirlwind literature and analysis, nowhere near the sections for fiction or Guardians' field journals, when she finds the book.

A card falls out as soon as she pulls it off the shelf – Rust picks it up off the ground and tries to make out the handwriting, littered with unfamiliar shorthand.

> _Luna – 76.16.1.5_
> 
> _Marks on colony ships, habitats. Ek. graffiti, disturbed ground underneath. Drop points? Trading dead drop? Spies? Gh said smugglers, but cd be alliance. Keep an eye on this._

Rust moves over to a carrel with the book and everything tucked into it, leafing through the thing. There are more cards tucked into its spine every few pages, along with some journaling in the book's margins. The marginalia includes a good deal of heckling for the book itself – the journaler had underlined a sentence about _the Reefborn's eyes luminous with arousal, his cornflower chest heaving,_ and written next to it, _Hah!_

There are some fair summaries of Cabal military history that help Rust puzzle out some of the author's shorthand, notes on the origins of a few (in)famous weapons, and a list of dates and galactic coordinates topped with the mysterious heading _Gh. Re._ Rust frowns down at that for a few minutes, until she connects a sequence of times, very close together, to their location, the tricky glass cliffs of Triton where Rust had spent a good few lives herself. _Ghost resurrection._ Was the writer a Thanatonaut?

Rust finds one folded-up poster for a hangar dance party from long before her rebirth in Light (“Dance till dawn for the Dawning!!”), and on the back of it, there's a long, rambling text in a particularly incoherent scrawl she can only partially read, something about – Cayde-6 being connected to the Warminds, somehow? The name _Andal_ comes up a lot in that one.

The Vanguard, past and present, are the topic of a lot of the notes. There's a tally of every Vanguard the Tower's had, how long they kept their posts, and if they're still alive or not. Every ex-Vanguard except for Osiris has either a check or a cross in that column; Osiris gets a wavy line and an arrow looped around his name, pointing to a cramped bit of margin:

> _Missing, never confirmed dead, always assume Gu alive until Gh death conclusive_

In all, it makes for one of the strangest collections Rust has seen – plain fact tucked up against bizarre conspiracy theories against scathing critiques of badly written sex scenes.

Rust takes the book to the main desk, a sweep of polished Ionian wood. Tertiaire-5 is sitting behind it, humming and peering at a glass slide through a pocket microscope. 

Rust's Ghost pops out from the hollow of her collar and flashes a greeting with his eye.

“Hi!” he says. “We found this with the Eliksni lit, but it was definitely shelved wrong. Also, defaced.”

Tertiaire flips the book over. “Not one of ours,” she says. She runs a hand over the binding and frowns. “No stamp, and we take much better care of our material.”

She holds up the book, spine out. It's held together with tape, falling apart underneath it.

“Probably a Hunter,” Tertiaire says. “They keep trying to hide things in here. Caches, stashes, whatever. Then whatever they hide leaks onto _my books_ and have the nerve to complain when I put their garbage where it belongs.”

Her oral backlights flare a sharp orange.

“So we... shouldn't put it back where it was?” Rust's Ghost asks.

“No,” Tertiaire growls, and the microscope slide in her other hand disintegrates in her grip.

They take the book with them.

* * *

Someone calls the two of them over on their way up to the plaza: Cix sitting with Asaamu on a rooftop. They're basking in the early-autumn sun, a bag of dried cococherries between them.

Rust makes her way up to them and sits down on the busily patterned rug they're sharing. It's hot from the sun, and she gladly lets its warmth seep into her legs after a morning spent in the dry cold of the libraries.

“Hey buddy,” Asaamu says, voice bright. “Finally getting into good old Earth fiction?”

Rust frowns down at the book in her hand. “Not really,” she says. “Are conspiracy theories fiction?”

She passes it over. Asaamu flips through the book, stopping to read a few of the notes.

Cix peers over his shoulder, holding her hair out of her eyes. “Why is there a gum wrapper in your book, Rust? A gum wrapper and a... dead Martian beetle?”

“I've been trying to find that out for about an hour,” Rust says. “I found someone's scrapbook in the library and Tertiaire-5 made me take it. She said it's probably a Hunter's. Asaamu, do you recognize it?”

Asaamu unfolds a paper flower made from a receipt. He flips it over to find a drawing of a psion's jawbone and a theory on Cabal machine intelligence, and frowns down at it. “Nope, but there's a lot of people who keep this sort of thing nowadays. If you put it back they'll probably come pick it up eventually.”

Cix squints. “Wait, _The Exo's Reefborn Lover_? What kind of a scrapbook is this?”

“The deeply weird kind,” says Rust's Ghost. He hovers overhead and shines a point of light down onto the pages. “See, half of this person's notes are bizarro theories about Tower cafeteria food and half of them are yelling about the book's ignorance of exo anatomy.”

Asaamu sits up straight. “Exo anatomy, you say,” he says, and something in his voice makes Cix turn to him and say, strangled, “Don't you dare.”

“Don't I?” Asaamu asks, grinning hard. He holds the book away from Cix and starts reading from it in a booming voice:

“ _Encephal-2 held Artyomov to herself, even as Artyomov reached for their gauntlets. 'Surely the Queen can spare you for an hour,' she said_ – no, this part's boring, we can definitely do better, oh _yes_ here we go: _Encephal gazed at her lover with eyes shining with electric charge, and Artyomov's eyes caught that fierce blaze and returned it threefold. Encephal felt like that look was burning her up, her circuits overheating, her cooling fans unable to keep up. She took Artyomov's hand in hers and guided it down, down to the secret places she'd never shown anybody else–_ ”

“I'm going to kill you,” Cix mumbles from behind him, face sunk into her hands.

“Is it accurate?” Asaamu asks. “Tell us, Cix, did–” he checks the spine “–Beatris Chriqui, of hallowed name, get this right?”

Rust looks back and forth between the two of them, lost.

“Someone,” Asaamu tells her, “had an excellent night with an exo of our acquaintance. I was just hearing all about it.”

“It was one drink when you bailed on us, I'm going to kill you,” Cix says, and throws the open bag of cococherries at him.

Most of them land in his lowered hood.

“Wait,” says Rust, “I want to hear everything, unless – is it a secret? Should I be throwing things at 'Saamu too?”

“She said she was going to tell you!”

“I wasn't going to tell her with a dramatic reading of bad erotica!” Cix claws at her hair. “Rust. I'm, uh. Trying something new with Orha?”

“Oh!” says Rust. “Congratulations. I hope you two are happy together!” She hadn't expected that, but then, she never expected any of her fellow Guardians' romances – she'd spent a week quietly baffled in the spring when the Crimson Days rolled around.

“They will be if this book is at all accurate,” says Asaamu. Cix pulls his hood up and over his eyes. A shower of cococherries falls out.

“It's new,” says Cix, wide shoulders hunched. “We're trying it out. So don't go reading that book to them, alright?”

Cix eventually tells her a little more, and the three of them pick dried fruit out of Asaamu's hood while she does.

After a while, Asaamu stands up. “I think there's a few down the back of my shirt,” he tells them, and taps Cix's thigh with the toe of his boot. “I'm going to go get them out before they stain my gear, you monster.”

“Yeah, yeah, you deserve it. See you for the Festival next month?” Cix asks.

“Definitely.” And he hops down off the roof. Cix tosses one last cococherry at him as he goes.

Cix sighs. “I still need a mask – want to come find one with me?”

“Sure. Ghost, you wanted a new costume, right?”

“I want to be a servitor this year,” Rust's Ghost says, rotating his back segments with anticipation.

Cix laughs. “That definitely sounds doable. I'm on patrol in the Andes next week till this whole parade thing kicks up – I'll comm you two when I get back.”

* * *

Rust takes the book to Rahool at the close of the day, when the sun is sinking behind the Wall and throwing long shadows across the plaza. 

“Ah,” he says, when he sees it: “Cayde-6 finally starting that book club, then?”

“He – what – no, what?” Rust's Ghost asks, sputtering. “No, tell me later. No, we found this in the library – take a look inside.”

Rahool pages through the book. A piece of cardstock catches against his thumb, and he pulls it out.

“Hrm. Haven't heard that story in years: the Speaker banned the tapes putting it about,” he says, and flips it over. “This one I know is a lie, I was there for the whole thing to fall apart. This got disproven two centuries back and Tyra's never let me forget it... oh, but this, now _this_ looks interesting. Warlock, have you ever in your studies come across a mention of the Apolunar Order?”

“No,” Rust says. “Are they Warlocks?”

“Yes. Hm, no. Or: partially. Get Banshee, would you, Guardian? I think he'll want to hear this too.”

Banshee's close by, packing up his desk for the night. As Rust approaches, he locks up the case to his machine equipment, tucking the key into a hidden pocket.

“Guardian,” he says, looking at her. Something in the set of his face reads as a squint to her, so Rust says,

“Hello, Banshee. It's Rust – we've met before. Rahool sent me to get you.”

They make their way back to Rahool's booth, Rahool still peering down thoughtfully at the bit of card in his hand. 

His face brightens when he sees Banshee. “Ah, there you are! I was just telling this young Guardian and her Ghost about the Apolunatics. Seemed like the sort of thing you'd want to be here for, old friend.”

Banshee grunts, but he settles back against the counter with the stance of someone ready to be there for a while. Rust sits down cross-legged on top of a humming decryption engine.

“The Apolunar Order started as just another Warlock order, with the curious specification that every member was an exo. They eventually opened up membership to exo Titans and Hunters, and even a few dedicated exo civilians. Their thought was that somehow the moon had to do with their origins, that they could find answers about where they'd come from if they went there.”

“No answers on the moon,” Banshee says, in his gloomy rumble. “At least for the living. The rest of us learned that a long time ago.”

“Exactly. But still, this order was convinced that if only we could take back the moon, or at least its research domes, they'd find something. There was some crossover in the Order with Osiris' disciples – all these people with affinities for long shots and lost causes, I suppose.”

Rust rests her chin in her hand. “So what happened to them? And why haven't I heard of them before?”

“People don't like to talk too much about their failures. What happened to them? Lost causes. They went to the moon. They died to the Hive. The ones that came back broke from the order or went to go chase after Osiris on Mercury instead.” Banshee shakes his head.

“Banshee's right – I never heard of any useful data on exos making its way back from the moon. Nor anything to confirm the Apolunar theory that the Crypt some exos dream of was a real place at all, much less a place on our little moon.”

Rahool puts the book down and picks up his slate, glowing against his fingers. 

“There are two books I know of if you want to learn more about the Apolunatics. One is the memoir of a Titan disciple of Osiris, and one is a collection of interviews with members of the order. The two contradict each other in nearly every respect,” he adds.

“And what about our mystery conspiracist?” Rust gestures to the book. The lanternlight makes the embossing on its title gleam.

Rahool passes the book to her. The card reads,

> _Reef – 32.11.1.3_
> 
> _Spoke to AW agent. Showed me a caravel. Derelict. 11 corpses on board. Proto-exo, running from personality insertion Crypt on Luna. Didn't make it far – Bray sabotage. Check with Charlemagne db. Sr codes: 337-42A 337-21E 240-90D 338-18C 337-21A 333-33B 297-03D 297-03E 312-31F 337-27C 301-(????)_

Rust looks down at the card, perplexed. “Huh,” her Ghost says, after an equally confused pause.

“Whoever put these notes together has the oddest, most scattered knowledge base I think I've ever seen. There's no context to any of these cards, and no indication of an organizational system that I can spot at all,” says Rahool.

“Probably just some Warlock sitting in a bar writing down people's drunk theories,” Banshee says. He taps the book. “Killing time on patrol, maybe, shooting the shit with teammates.”

“I don't think any of us can say we've never done that,” says Rahool. “You'd best bring it back to the library before someone misses it.”

“Now there's a long shot,” Rust's Ghost mutters to her.

“Oh, and Warlock, that engram you passed along to me the other day – a curious encryption. I should be done with it the next time you swing by.”

“Thanks, Rahool,” Rust says. She knows a dismissal when she hears it, so she adds, “Good night, Banshee.”

At the stairs leading to the other side of the Tower, Rust pauses and looks back for a moment. Two frames are sweeping up some early fallen leaves, one collecting a soccer ball from the lower branches of a tree. Tess is rolling down her shutters for the evening. A cricket somewhere strikes up its creaking song against the noise of jumpships and drones flying in and out of the hangar bays below. And Banshee-44 and Rahool are still standing together, heads bent towards one another, looking at something on Rahool's slate.

“Well, I have learned absolutely nothing today,” Rust's Ghost says.

“Some decent gossip, at least.” 

He lights up at that. “That's true! So I was talking with Nhour earlier while Cix was yelling, and she confirmed the whole thing, and you should hear what else she told me about Orha–”

* * *

They take the book back to the library. Rust's Ghost peeks around a corner before they enter the hall – “Safe,” he says. “Looks like Tertiaire went off-duty.”

There's another Warlock behind the main desk now, a Gensym Scribe Rust knows only by sight.

Rust puts the book back onto the shelf it came from, tucked halfway behind two volumes of a Fallen playwright's collected works.

She stands and looks at it for a moment, frowning. “Guess we'll come back in a while and see if it's still here?”

Her Ghost rolls through the air. “You know, if it's gone, we won't even know who took it. Could be the person who made it, could be Tertiaire cleaning up.”

“If she's the one who finds it we will definitely hear about it,” says Rust, dry.

“That's for sure! Well, we've gotta be back here in a couple weeks anyway so we can get me a decent costume before everything sells out. May as well take a peek then.”

Two weeks later, the library and everything on its level lies under a hundred tons of rubble, and what's left of the Tower above it is choked with ash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience in the month it took to get this chapter up, everyone -- life has been happening with some genuinely impressive comic timing over the course of writing this fic. The last chapter is finished, too, and that'll go up this weekend!


	7. Eyes Up, Guardian

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go.

Step 7: Reach the Farm

> “Your story doesn't end here, Guardian. Learn from your mistakes! Survive to fight again.” –Lord Shaxx

Rust lies two days under a collapsed building, working up the strength to dig herself out. She'd been in the city centre, avoiding the parade afterparties, when the Cabal attack fell on them from above. The alarm sirens had gone off, and almost no time at all later, they'd all seen the Tower explode into rubble.

She fought the Cabal in the streets that night, grappling hand-to-hand with legionaries five times her mass to give a group of civilians time to escape, to shelters underground or away from the city entirely. A centurion twisted her neck, and when her Ghost woke her back up again it had felt wrong, something stuttering in the Light.

There hadn't been any time for that, no time for any thought but the battlehum, no way to cut through half the city to the Tower and find out what was happening, until she'd been ripped from the Light. Torn not along the seams but through the fabric of her, a shirt's mourning-tear through reality.

Rust had gasped, gone to one knee, not yet fully understanding why. Reached for the Light, for her Ghost, found neither. In that moment, she'd been unable to move, couldn't get herself to dodge when a drop pod crashed down on the building next to her and brought it down with it. Rust had gone under, and her last glimpse of the sky and Traveler above was red, red, red.

Now, she works her way out, worming through crevices, backtracking at dead ends, holding her breath through the passing Cabal street patrols. She hasn't heard a single civilian – or Guardian, for that matter – in thirty-six hours, the city's centre so empty between patrols that every pebble her shifting pushes off the pile of wreckage echoes through the street.

Something is terribly wrong with her right shoulder, her lungs, at least two ribs, and both her ankles. Her palms and fingers burn, gloves tattered and skin sandpapered raw from pulling herself through rubble. She's had worse, but never without the Light to send white fire through her, keeping her whole enough to keep going.

Now she's by herself, and it's almost impossible to not just... stop.

“Ghost,” Rust hisses, chanting to herself, as she wedges rebar against enamel-faced brick. “Ghost, Ghost, Ghost, where are you?”

The only thing lighting her way through the pressing dark – what Rust's best guess of _her way_ is – is the flickering patterns on her skin, weak and fitful lightning over her cheek. 

She pushes herself upwards. The rebar snaps under her hands, and she falls, a scraping slide back through the narrow passage she made for herself.

“Ghost, Ghost, Ghost,” Rust whispers, blinking up at the dark, giving herself a moment before she goes on. Just a moment.

It's a long, long moment, one that stretches out as Rust sees a hint, a glimmer of more light than can be credited to just her Awoken skin. It fades, then reemerges, then fades again. Another long minute as Rust's tired brain connects a pattern: it's pulsing in time with her chant.

“Ghost, Ghost,” she says, and stretches an arm out. “Ghost,” she says, and winces at something grinding in her shoulder socket. “Ghost, Ghost, Ghost,” she says, and pulls sooty roofing tile out of the way.

And he's there, eye barely powered on, coated in brick dust and char.

“ _Ghost_ ,” she says, and reaches for him. 

It takes him near half an hour to knit her back into something even resembling shape. Rust holds him with a grip she knows is too tight, a grip she can't make herself slacken. 

She gives a choked cry when his remaining Light touches her shoulder.

“I got you, Guardian,” he tells her, and “Don't worry,” he says, but his chassis won't stop trembling under her fingers.

They make their way out from under the building, eventually, to a city full of nothing but Cabal and smoke. The fountain at the end of the street is cracked, spilled out, its plants dried and dying.

A noise rings through the street, a hollow, too-loud clatter – a hammered brassware teacup Rust kicked without seeing. She picks it up. It's just like a hundred cups she's drunk from, cups any shop or homeowner would have, cheerfully decorated, made in one of the factories in the City's southeastern quarter. 

They need to get out of the way before any Cabal shows up, drawn by the noise. Rust hauls herself and her Ghost into the nearest building that looks structurally sound, collapses on a padded bench inside. Her Ghost flits from counter to pantry to door, pretending nonchalance, pointing out supplies.

Only sludge comes out of the pipes, but there's a jug of water under the sink. Rust splashes a handful over her face, sees it come down grey with ash and dust. 

“So the City's fallen,” she says, bleak. It hurts to talk, comes out harsh through her aching throat. “We've got to regroup. Find whoever's left.”

“Drink something,” her Ghost tells her. Painfully, she does. She finally diagnoses her queasiness: grief, and dehydration. 

Two Cabal pass in the street outside, steps clanking in their pressure suits. Rust snaps a hand out for her Ghost to cover his eye with her glove. If they find her here, she's dead, permanently, and so's her Ghost.

She doesn't breathe till they're out of earshot.

They can't stay in the City. Rust finds a box in a hall closet: old militia gear, packed up with care. There's a backpack covered in fading patches marking loyalty to three separate squadrons. The left strap is crushed from long handling, softer than the right.

She takes the water, food from the kitchen. There's a pair of boots kicked under a bed, too big for her feet, but there's a dresser, and thick socks inside it. Rust's own boots, designed for war on alien planets, haven't survived the invasion on home turf: the right sole's torn itself completely free.

They wait for another patrol to pass before leaving, halfway through the night. On their way out, Rust looks for the street number on the building. If they live through this, if the City lives through this, if the people whose clothes and food she's stolen live through this, she'll come and pay them back.

A glance upwards turns into a flinch as she sees the Traveler, locked up by a Cabal machine. It glows dull red under that net, feverish, like it's trying to fight off an infection.

They have to pick a direction. Rust picks west, on the basis that there's more continent that way, maybe a higher chance they'll find someone. The rising sun chases them out of the city, overtaking their slow walk. 

With the Light propping her up, Rust didn't have to have more than a mouthful of water and a few bites of food every day. Now she has to stop what feels like constantly, or eat while walking, while keeping an ear out for patrols. Once, there's a whine of alien jetpacks ahead, and she ducks under a torn awning on a market street. The storefront is still lit, a backup generator humming along somewhere. There's fruit in a display case, packages of sliced kiwicumber and apple, still cool. She takes them.

Every time Rust looks back to check she's not being followed, she sees the Traveler and the burning stump of the Tower behind it, and it makes something hurt in her stomach.

Crossing the Wall takes too long and ends in a long scramble over yet another mass of rubble. The sun's high – anyone passing could spot them, any passing thresher could pick them off with a single shot. The worry makes Rust hurry, the overwhelming weariness makes her clumsy, and she trips and rolls the rest of the way down. 

They find the corpse of one militiamember at the base of a tree, still unlooted. One rifle on them. Decent mid-range scope, thirty bullets. Rust takes them, and covers the body's face with the bandana from around its neck. Nothing else she can do.

They don't pass any live people, and no vehicles at all. They keep heading west, Rust's Ghost in her pocket, too scared to decorporealize. 

A Cabal legionary with a pack of warbeasts find her, two hours after that, and that's most of the ammunition gone right there. One beast gets a chunk of her calf, and after the fight, she has to drag herself to cover on it, bleeding heavily, before her Ghost can try to patch it up. It takes him an hour.

They walk for days, always heading due west. Moving through a long-disused aqueduct for cover, they finally find something useful, in an abandoned Fallen camp full of signs of a quick departure: a pike her Ghost pronounces _functional, probably._

It coughs and whines and its faulty suspension makes them feel every dip in the roads, but it takes them west faster, at least.

A week after the City's fall, Rust stumbles across people – living people – for the first time. Workers from a farm nearby and their family, they say, just trying to get away from the danger before winter sets in. They ask what she knows of the Cabal.

Rust has spent weeks at a time posted on Mars, watching for Cabal, tracking the leadership and their goals. She's skulked through firebases and flagships, heard the footsoldiers complain about the food, their lieutenants, the strange pressure of local gravities. She's read books on Cabal biology, theology, philosophy.

Right now she doesn't know anything. She just shakes her head.

The caravan tells her, they've heard a rumour of Guardians massing, a long, long way out west.

Rust thanks them, hesitates; she wants to give them something in return, a gesture towards civilization. All she's got, though, is nine bullets, a sleeve of rye crackers, and three cans of anchovies.

An exo, the sole nonhuman of the group, moves up to her. He offers his hand, tells her, “You seem alright, but we don't want those turtles coming for us because of you. Or the bugs, for that motorbike there. You'd best go, Guardian.”

That makes it easier. She blinks some of the fuzz from her mind, gives him a smile, and goes.

A week after that, when she's down to four bullets and one cracker, she runs into another caravan. Not civilians, this time, but a group of local militia scouts with stolen, console-hacked groundcars. They haul Rust's pike onto a sledge, Rust into a seat, give her oatmeal and coffee. 

They've got radios, kept in contact with others. The infrastructure isn't in such bad shape, out here, especially for the settlements unaffiliated with the City. Smaller targets, no permanent Guardian presence to draw the Cabal.

“We've seen other Guardians pass,” one of them tells her, watching her with steady eyes. “They all looked like you. Shellshocked. Two of them, going together, the weird ones who like their knives too much – Hunters? alright – they said something about a shard, and it didn't make any sense at all to me, but hopefully it does to you.”

Rust's Ghost pops out of her pocket. He looks right at the scout who just spoke, and they rear back, hand slipping to their waist.

“Shard? Did you say shard? Guardian, did you hear that?” he asks, but Rust hurries to talk over him, saying, “This is my Ghost. Not an enemy, not alien tech. Nobody shoot.”

The scout settles down, brushes imaginary dust off their vest. “A Ghost, huh. Well, Ghost, that's all I have for you. They didn't stay more than a few minutes. Still had those, what, robins? Oh, sparrow? Okay – well, they took off again on those. Going north and west, I think, but if they didn't turn too soon they'll have run into the sea.”

“The _shard_ ,” says Ghost again, and spins back to Rust. It's the most energetic she's seen him in days. “Rust, you know what that means! If we're lucky we might touch the Light yet!”

Rust has to close her eyes at that, too tired for hope. Her Ghost chatters to the scouts in the car, demanding a map and their radio frequencies. 

Unable to really sleep surrounded by strangers, Rust just drifts in her seat, and soon enough, before the sun's moved too far across the sky, the car rumbles to a halt.

“Your stop, Guardian,” the scout tells her. “This is where we split up, if you want to go with this – Ghost.” They cast a doubtful look at her and at her Ghost, now nestled in her lap in the hollow of her helmet. 

She rubs her face with both hands, scrubbing over her scalp. Her hair's growing in, too thick, pricking her palms through her torn gloves. No way to shave it out here. It just makes seeing her reflection that much stranger. There's a disconnect between her and that person with tired eyes, torn gear, and that shock of white hair.

“I've trusted my life to him, what is it, Ghost, a couple hundred times now?” she asks, trying to pull up a smile. “What's one more?”

“Might be the last one, though,” her Ghost says, subdued. 

Rust picks him up. “Then let's make it count,” she tells him. She shakes the scout's hand, accepts a packet of their home-dried deer jerky and a refill of her water jug. It's more generosity than Rust expected, or knows what to do with.

They drag the pike back onto the ground, wincing at every bump – someone else in the caravan shakes her head at her, tell her: “That thing's engine'll explode as easy as looking at you, you know.”

Rust gives half a shrug, tries half a smile. It feels like old paper on her face, too thin. “Faster than walking.”

They split up, Rust waving from the back of the pike. As night falls, they come by on that inland sea the scouts mentioned, breaking first through the wide brown scrubland, then a ring of forest, then to the long sloping shore.

It's something easy to forget, so much time on assignment elsewhere in the solar system, that humanity's home planet is every bit as strange as Mars, as beautiful as Venus, without the Traveler's intervention.

Rust sits on the rocky beach, watching the waves move against the shore. Her breath slows to match its rhythm, and she leans against the pike, Ghost by her shoulder. Nocturnal creatures pass around them, filling up the empty spaces in the night.

She gives herself an hour, and they set out again.

The two of them have passed officially into Europe by her Ghost's maps before they hear word again. A tired voice crackles into life over one of the frequencies the scouts gave them. The volume and pitch jerk up and down a few times before settling, like someone's hooked up an amplifying array in the middle of a broadcast. The message: someone's set up a base for refugees, civilian and Guardian alike. The Cabal are settling in for a siege. The Vanguard's not on Earth, but they're in contact with Zavala. And at least one Guardian's touched the Shard, and... gotten their Light back.

Rust looks at her Ghost, and some of the fog that's been in her head since the City fell lifts away, dispelled by the ready light in his eye and the morning sun behind him.

“Maybe,” he starts, and “We could,” she says, and they stop together.

“We've got to try,” Rust finally says, quiet.

“No argument here, Guardian,” says her Ghost, relief plain in the set of his segments.

The pike takes them a few hundred more kilometres before its engine coils start leaking more smoke than her Ghost will accept, and they abandon it. Walking on foot again, always west, from scrub to foothills to forest-edge, and into the forest itself, pockmarked with disused settlements and Fallen encampments. Rust kills an advance scout with her second-to-last bullet and steals its shock knife.

They come under the shadow of the Shard at sunset, night's dark already heavy inside its curve. Rust lets a breath out long and low, and adjusts the strap of her pack where it bites into her shoulder. 

Rust wants to sit there and think about the City, mourn the fallen Tower – the terraces where she'd sat in the sun, the nooks in the wall where she'd meditated to the high-altitude wind whistling past, the tiny food stalls with tinier counters where she'd sat and nursed a drink as Asaamu wound Orha up as only he could, the fountains on the streets whole and bubbling. The Warlock library, and its displays of strange mementos from stranger worlds. The Crucible arenas, and the hangar – she'd slept in her jumpship in the hangar more than once, too tired to navigate the crowded dorms; she wishes now that she'd gone to the dorms more often. All slag now, or being used for bored Cabal soldiers' target practice.

She'll think about it later, she tells herself. Later, when she has the room for it. She breathes in. Opens a pocket in her pack for her Ghost.

“Well,” she says. From the pocket, eye's glow leaking through the fabric, her Ghost says, “Here goes nothing.”

Rust moves forward into the trees, her shadow pacing her a step behind, the sun on the horizon warming her and giving her, at least for now, a little light to work with.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, so much, for reading this fic. It took longer than I expected, but I'm also prouder of it than I expected, and I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did.


End file.
